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A comment on Ask HN: Do you think Agile/Scrum is beneficial for software delivery?. Parent comment

Re:Ask HN: Do you think Agile/Scrum is beneficial for softwa... by stephenhuey on Thursday March 04, 2021 @08:30PM (#26351246)
I feel like various Agile frameworks might be saying “You are doing it wrong” to people using Waterfall for software development. In that case, I would agree. 16 years ago I talked to a project manager who had done PM for a nuclear plant and Waterfall is ok for that, but not usually for software where you learn more from users about what should be done and tweaked as you go along. Perhaps you are just seeing Scrum in places where they are doing Scrum wrong, e.g. adding to it and making it heavy-handed and overbearing.

If you’re on a team of more than a couple people and you have stakeholders feeding requirements to the project, what do you do that’s so different from the simple process of Scrum? It’s just set up to say, hey, we’re going to work on these items for the next week or two, and please don’t constantly come interrupt me in the middle to ask me to fit in a bunch more things than what we agreed to work on in this short time period. Then we’ll show you how it’s working and you can decide what we do next.

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Re:Ask HN: Do you think Agile/Scrum is beneficial for softwa... by chris11 on Friday March 05, 2021 @03:17AM (#26354256)
> people using Waterfall for software development.

Is anyone really doing Waterfall now? Maybe earlier some industries used a Waterfall like process. But actual descriptions of Waterfall seem to go back 50 years to Royce's paper, Managing the Development of Large Software Systems. That model was explicitly described as bad. I don't fully agree with that paper, but his suggested improvements are more iterative. Personally it seems like now Waterfall is mostly used as a strawman.

> but not usually for software where you learn more from users about what should be done and tweaked as you go along

I agree with that. I wonder if Agile is highly influenced by it's leaders being closely involved with consulting.

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